underuse
Most causes of joint pain are simply the result of overuse.
Overuse of antibiotics can create mutated bacteria that are immune to the drugs.
There were fears about traffic problems in the area and the over-use of the site.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Using and misusing
adopt
adoption
avail
avail yourself of something
be/go heavy on somethingidiom
exhaust
give/allow something full playidiom
go into something
go through
gobble something up
make capital out of somethingidiom
spare
spent
swallow
tap
turn to someone/something
turn/use something to good accountidiom
unblock
underuse
underused

overuse | American Dictionary

overuse
verb[ T ]
us/ˌoʊ·vərˈjuz/
to use something too often or too much:
We all tend to overuse certain expressions.

overuse

noun[ U ]us/ˌoʊ·vərˈjus/
You can strain your muscles from sudden twisting or overuse.

Examples of overuse

overuse
Although the term 'listening' seems to be overused in the literature on communication and counselling skills, it is undoubtedly the most important.
He found that learners at all proficiency levels overused direct requests and underused nonconventionallyindirect requests (hints).
Kindergartners overused letters from their own first names (or commonly used nicknames) when spelling.
Despite denials that they made any such claim, there is little doubt that in the first flush of enthusiasm some analytical tools were overused.
Introspection can thus be overused to become a comfortable illusion for the theorist, and an obstacle for science.
Classifying something as being overused and stale does not immediately call to mind a distinctive linguistic category.
As one can expect, the central government will continue spending money on the ground subsidence problem as long as groundwater is overused in this area.
They are not overused; they are just used.
Thus, common nouns that were used as proper names formed a category of bare nouns that was clearly overused by children, particularly at younger ages.
Both tests are probably overused with a high rate of inappropriateness.
The results show that in the cultural, general, and structural categories, the intermediate students overused the more than both the low-level and the advanced students, respectively.
While introspection can be useful for the generation of ideas, it can also be overused and become a comfortable illusion for the theorist and an obstacle for science.
The supply of object agreement cannot be due to a general strategy of overusing agreement, since object agreement does not occur in prohibited contexts such as intransitive clauses.
To explain kindergartners' overuse of letters from their own names, we postulate that letter frequency is an individual matter for young children.
The finding that go3 was overused by the participants is pertinent to theorizing about the use of a general classifier by very young children.
See all examples of overuse
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.